Politics disguised as science: when to doubt a scientific consensus [link]

The problem with conformity is that it deprives a society of the information it desperately needs…the dissenter challenges the status quo, introducing new ideas that may aid his group by improving an ailing system.” [link]

“Interestingly, green academics (those studying subjects like climate change or sustainability) not only had the same level of emissions from air travel as their peers, but they were indistinguishable in the category of “easily avoidable” trips as well.” [link]

“Moral grandstanding is the use of public moral discourse for self-promotion and status attainment…Across studies, moral grandstanding was associated with status-seeking personality traits, as well as greater political and moral conflict in daily life.” https://psyarxiv.com/gnaj5/

For the over 50’s: Your professional decline is coming much sooner than you think. Here’s how to make the most of it [link]

“Another unusual aspect of recent climate change is its cause: past climate changes were natural in origin (see FAQ 6.1), whereas most of the warming of the past 50 years is attributable to human activities”

without it raising red flags. It is scientifically unsupportable. Dr. David Wojick says,

“The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates.”

Do you subscibe to the wisdom of the Canadian court in ordering this apology to Mann?

The President of the Frontier Centre , Mr. Peter Holle writes :

“It was wrong to publish allegations by others that Dr. Mann did not comply with ethical standards and wrong to suggest thatDr. Mann was guilty of any dishonesty concerning his 1998 and 1999 research which produced the so-called “hockey stick “temperature graph.”

“You seem to have missed the much more interesting Peter Ridd story in your own blog Russell”

Not so.

Though I applaud the Australlian court’s ruling in Ridds favour as much as the Canadian Judge’s vindication of Mann, William Connolley beat me to the story last year with a two part piece L’ affaire Peter Ridd, in Stoat, which frequently links to The Climate Wars.

It took 20 seconds to find the comment towards the end of only 91 comments on the page I linked to. That is far less time than it took you to write your post asking where the comment was. Do get a grip Russell.

Now you will presumably retract your statement that it wasn’t covered and in turn post something on your own site in which your gratitude to Peter Ridd can be properly expressed?

One can not just search, ut read everything you’ve posted on your Climatereason blog since 2010 in a tenth that time ! It is a model of Botly concision–

Hello world!
Posted on November 18, 2010 by climatereason
Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment
1 Response to Hello world!
Mr WordPress says:
November 18, 2010 at 3:30 pm
Hi, this is a comment.
To delete a comment, just log in, and view the posts’ comments, there you will have the option to edit or delete them.

I am not interested in running an active blog. You are. Hence I have no entries.

If you want to promote your items here that is fine by me and seems to be fine with our gracious host. But you were wrong about the news being missed on WUWT and in turn you have carried nothing about surely the bigger story about Peter Ridd on your blog, despite saying you were glad about the decision. I am hoping you will want to rectify that.

For my part I have never heard of Frontier before and have little interest in the story.. I think there is another court case pending with some American shock jock? That has gone quiet or perhaps I just missed the outcome.

How do the models have it wrong? Rather than simplifying reality as we with GCM mechanics, we have more compelling explanations concerning the complexity and interconnectedness of natural phenomena comprising global warming– e.g., key elements are solar activity and understanding (capturing) the effects of the natural power of ‘swirling vortices’ on ocean dynamics.

Unlike the silly science of Trenbreth who seeks to keep the AGW hoax alive by looking for global warming in the deep recesses of the ocean, scientific skeptics of climate change alarmism know Trenbreth’s search for hidden heat is futile and no matter how much AGW True Believers may wish otherwise, global cooling is not proof of global warming.

Hopefully the mathematics of swirling vortices will help to reveal the obvious that, given differences in ocean temperature in the real world cold surface water sinks to the bottom. In the real world, the heat is there because the heater as been relatively quiet compared to the last half of the 20th century.

In other words, academia is colluding with those whose only objective is to bring about the fall of Western civilization… Science has nothing to do with it – global warming is nothing more than a hoax and a scare tactic… nothing more than left versus right politics.

https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0681.1?af=R
What Controls the Duration of El Niño and La Niña Events?“La Niña events preceded by a strong warm event tend to persist into the second year because of large initial discharge of the equatorial oceanic heat content and delayed adjustments of the tropical Atlantic and Indian Oceans to the tropical Pacific cooling.”

This is the reason why I think the next Niña could be a strong two-year one. The heat discharged at the big 2014-2016 El Niño has not been recharged, so the system is primed for a long Niña, and solar activity is about to become the right one for that to happen. Over the past 7 solar cycles there has been predominant Niña conditions during the rapidly rising phase of activity.

If I am correct we might re-enter the pause in warming temperature levels by 2021-22, with the big El Niño being just a parenthesis.

Of course climate alarmists are trying hard to scare everybody into adopting emission cutting policies before that happens. It would be hard to do it afterwards.

Which means the previous 5 months were not record, which means 2019 will likely not be a record warm year. BFD.

You should learn the significance of statistical data. Measuring 12 months a year and being among the five warmest years means the chance of having one month or even two as the warmest has a high probability. It still says nothing except that the world has been warming, which we have known for like 35 years (and it has been doing for like 300 years). Old news, buddy.

Yeah it’s a bit of a misdirection but I couldn’t resist since it was just announced.
Look, I don’t dispute your opinion of the direction of the climate but there are just too many other factors for the human brain to make sense of. Someday we will build planet models and move beyond climate models and we can start focusing on how to avoid sub-optimal solutions. I rather enjoyed watching the presentations from last month’s Climate A.I. conference and there is clear evidence some big players(govt. & corp.) are working in that direction.https://www.climatechange.ai/ICML2019_workshop.html
I personally think all this obsession on first order effects of temperatures obscures the real problems of dealing with 2nd & 3rd order effects to the other parts of the biosphere. Have you ever seen a graph of the number and volume of novel ‘alien’ molecules we introduce into the environment every year? Hockey stick indeed.

RE: jacksmith “June was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, the EU’s satellite agency has announced.”

Perhaps in the EU but not here in Southern Ontario (Canada) which was cold and wet. I’m not sure if we had 3 days in a row without rain. Where is Jack from? Was it record hot? Or perhaps somewhere here in North America that had snow in June . . .

Well the fact remains it will either be a two year La’ Nina or it won’t. To me this article suggests it will be a two year event since the last El’Nino was a strong one. I think JCH and JackSmith 4Tx would agree with that (that it was a strong one)?

I have said several times that the disconnect between what politicians say about the climate crisis, and what they actually do about it, is clear evidence that they don’t believe it is an urgent and existential threat. Since voters are more convinced by actions than words most of them are aware, even if subconsciously, that the issue is being overhyped.

Definitely well written. But Nordhaus is long on climate science and a bit short on social science. Claiming the climate science debate to be essentially the province of neo-liberalism is sort of like whistling past the Marxist grave yard.

Looking at the component parts does not provide me with a holistic understanding of weather related excess mortality including the competing descriptors of Center for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) and the National Weather Service..

My putting together the parts together to make a whole: elderly low income men, especially Black men living in urban poverty and rural poverty areas can not shelter in place from the heat and cold. Many are renters, not owners of their dwellings; hence, can not alter easily their circumstances. This demographic are vulnerable because where they live demands housing that is insulated, utilities that are affordable and are paid on time, and a life focus upon self-sufficiency. Normal variances, ie, not extremes from normal temperatures can produce excessive stress in the aged and vulnerable. The people with the hardest to manage medical and mental health issues are this group. There is no coincidence that not managing one’s self makes one susceptible to dying from the weather. Cold requires much more sustained energy than tap water and a fan in the heat. There is just a need to pay attention and do what is necessary for survival.

In another country (France), and another time (2003), a heat wave, the excess 15,000+ who died from the heat were the elderly left to their own devices in spite of resources that were ostensibly available but never employed.

I am wealthy when I can flip a switch and turn on the air conditioner, or turn up the dial and heat my home. Even in the Medieval Warming Period, Kings could never do what I can do today. I am grateful.

I ran across this excellent article by David Festa, Senior Vice-president, Environmental Defense Fund, where he argues “As an environmentalist, we often refer to our work as ‘saving the planet.’ This is unhelpful for a couple of reasons.” To paraphrase: first it creates a binary confrontational environment where it is us against them, and second, it creates an expectation that we can freeze a moment in time, when in truth even if humans never emerged, the earth would still change.

Consensus Alarmist climate theory is based on the really dumb idea that we can stop the climate change that has always happened with a trace gas, one molecule in ten thousand has supposedly caused modern warming, which has been less than past natural warming periods, By removing that one molecule that has been added to ten thousand molecules we can achieve a hockey stick handle, regulated temperature, that has never happened before. If I described this with the language it deserves, my comment would be tossed out.

The authors unite a number of previously published proxy data sets to paint a picture of North Atlantic ocean circulation over the past 2,000 years. This compilation reveals details of past conditions in various regions. For example, the past 2,000 years around Greenland show progressively cooler and icier surface waters reaching the coldest conditions during the Little Ice Age. The compilation also underscores a need for more comprehensive data sets on deep North Atlantic waters for this period.

It snowed more in warmest times during the Medieval Warm Time and more ice volume and weight caused more ice flow and caused more cooling by reflecting and thawing of more ice extent. Colder times are colder because it snows more from more evaporation and snowfall and ice accumulation in warm times and ice advances after that. Occam would die, reading the alarmist junk, if he was not already dead.

I do dislike that I must repeat very clear facts that are very clear in actual data.

I can explain that a little more clearly, when more ice extent is is in contact with salty ocean currents, ice thaws and chills the ocean water more, the colder water sinks and circulates to the tropics a little faster. This is cause and not result. The changing currents are result of changes in ice thawing and not primary cause. Never believe you can understand climate without understanding natural internal response and cycles. To become a climate scientist, you must pass their exams that require you to answer with what they taught you to believe. To actually be a real climate scientist, you must question everything you were taught. They tell you, over and over, about things that no one understands. You must use that to doubt some of what you were taught.

“In the Earth system, as well as in many other complex systems, the most devastating impacts are often related to multiple, compound or synergistic drivers73. For instance, devastating wildfires need dry and hot conditions, available fuel, and an ignition source. Many impacts are related to threshold behavior74, and multiple drivers contribute to the tipping of the system.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10105-3

Much global weather and climate emerges from atmospheric see-saws modulated by polar surface pressure. Solar activity may be a factor. The coincidence of CET variability and sunspots for instance – although there are very likely multiple drivers and feedbacks. This may drive flow in the Peruvian and Californian currents that in turn facilitate – or not – cold water upwelling in both the north and south Pacific that initiates bistable Pacific states through wind and current feedbacks.

Upwelling is intensifying in the east – although whether this tips the subsystem to a cool state – with important and anti-correlated sst/cloud changes – is at the whim of the Dragon Kings. It’s the right time of year for it.

cold water upwelling in both the north and south Pacific that initiates bistable Pacific states through wind and current feedbacks.

You like to talk about upwelling, you don’t mention the cold water that upwells, downwelled, years before it upwelled, it does not get colder at the bottom of the oceans, it goes down there cold, years before, from cooling from contact with ice shelves and sea ice. Really cold water is chilled with salt water contact with thawing ice. Evaporation does not work that fast. Upwelling is driven by downwelling, years before, try to explain a different cause.

Upwelling in the eastern Pacific may be water that downwelled some 1000-1500 years earlier – but the conveyor belt is a bit old fashioned. Upwelling depends on winds, currents, the rotation of the Earth and ENSO dynamics driving changes in the depth of the thermocline on the eastern margin of continents.

That is junk. everything happens for a reason, if you do not understand the reason, admit it, do not blame it on a Dragon King. Chaos is just not understanding what is happening, there is no chaos with understanding.

Dragon Kings is a reference both to Didier Sornette and Chinese storm mythology. Deterministic chaos is about known unknowns (and perhaps unknown unknowns) in a complex dynamical system – far from a synonym for random.

When you do not study actual data, you use made up names to explain or excuse chaos. Chaos is a result of not using available data to understand what happened for what causes. Dragon Kings and Chicken Little and the King with no clothes on all fall into this bucket.

known unknowns (and perhaps unknown unknowns) in a complex dynamical system – far from a synonym for random

All due to not using actual data to understand stuff. I have trouble relating to this kind of junk. We have data, figure out what it tells us. Flawed, Basic, consensus, peer reviewed, theory and flawed basic facts have confused too many of you.

The article is interesting in its own right but it introduced me to something called “superstatistics”. This approach follows from the “fat tail” observation that bell like Gaussian curves are a poor approximation to distributions in real natural complex systems, whose real distributions are asymmetric with long and fat tails. Essentially susperstatistics is statistics of the fat tail.

Has this been applied to climate modelling?

Superstatistics (21) proposes that nonequilibrial systems can be decomposed into many local subsystems, each of which attains a unique dynamic equilibrium. The evolution of these dynamic equilibria across subsystems occurs more slowly. This separation in time scales allows local systems to reach equilibrium, while the system as a whole is not (21).

Superstatistics
C. Beck
School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile
End Road, London E1 4NS, UK
E.G.D. Cohen
The Rockefeller University, 1230 York Avenue, New York, NY 10021-6399
Abstract
We consider nonequilibrium systems with complex dynamics in
stationary states with large fluctuations of intensive quantities (e.g.
the temperature, chemical potential or energy dissipation) on long
time scales. Depending on the statistical properties of the fluctuations,
we obtain different effective statistical mechanical descriptions. Tsallis
statistics follows from a χ 2 -distribution of an intensive variable, but
other classes of generalized statistics are obtained as well. We show
that for small variance of the fluctuations all these different statistics
behave in a universal way.

Must read article of the week: The Empty Radicalism of the Climate Apocalypse [link]

“…ending capitalism and economic growth to rejecting materialism and consumption..”

Inertia. “..a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force. ” Inertia, the failure to change marked the period in US history just prior to WW II. It took the Japanese unprovoked bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Day of Infamy, to get the US to act in spite of Europe, our ancestor homeland being in flames.

Today, such a circumstance altering event is declared by environmental activists, an event taking place before our very eyes. Is it true? And here is where American opinion has decidedly opted for inertia, not doing anything. There is no bomb dropping. There is no perceptible abrupt change in the weather to alert us that things are different. Catastrophists attempt to make every day, all within normal variation events to be believed as signs of some sort of “coming.” Truly, evangelical, the second coming, just around the corner. And, you will be mightily sorry you didn’t listen to me, or us, or our scientists, or our politicians or your Sunday school teacher. You’ll be sorry (Just you wait Henry Higgins just you wait…thank you Eliza Doolittle, that is Do Little)

There is no one that I know of who are advocating building more large light water nuclear reactors any more. Their is no one advocating damming the Colorado River at Grand Canyon, that has already been done by the Glen Canyon dam making Lake Powell and the Hoover Dam making Lake Meade. Rather, technology, modular, factory built next generation nuclear power, maybe Thorium, is in the offing. Everyone seems fixated on the physics and yet, the physics are, wind energy is markedly less dense than say…natural gas. Solar energy is even less dense and available. Ten times the infrastructure necessary to achieve one natural gas combined generation power plant. Physics rules.

Preventing progress in energy development and deployment is the fictional Presidential inaugurate’s message and modus operandi.

We cut off their oil supply, that is not unprovoked. Our president helped cause the attack and knew about it. This was a necessary war and we did need to get involved, but do not pretend we did not help provoke it. I can not know if we should have done anything different.

I respectfully disagree. Japan, more than a decade earlier attempted to overlay an Emperor dominated Asian dynasty that was centuries in the making. Feeding a warrior class, Japan strived for natural resources, striking the US as a peremptory blow to control the islands of the Pacific making invasion of the homeland all but impossible.

“Historians agree Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 for two main reasons: ideology and natural resources.”

Japan’s Pearl Harbor strike was calculated and in the plans of the Japanese Empire long before any US economic belated efforts. We were still selling scrap iron, “Niponized bit of the old 6th Avenue El to the top of his head taught him.” History is not my first love, but it comes in a close second.

I respectfully disagree Disagree with what? Do you think we were totally surprised? You think we did nothing to provoke? Do you think we should have done something different? What do you respectfully disagree with?

I am interested in history and what did actually happen and why.
Yes, we were still trading with them, but it was known what they were doing and it was known that they were going to start a war with us.

The heart of the scientific enterprise is a rational effort to understand the causes behind the phenomena we observe. In large-scale complex dynamical systems such as the Earth system, real experiments are rarely feasible. However, a rapidly increasing amount of observational and simulated data opens up the use of novel data-driven causal methods beyond the commonly adopted correlation techniques. Here, we give an overview of causal inference frameworks and identify promising generic application cases common in Earth system sciences and beyond. We discuss challenges and initiate the benchmark platform causeme.net to close the gap between method users and developers.

A new paper finds coral reefs thrive during warm periods (rising sea levels) and experience die-offs during cold periods (falling sea levels).
So we’d ask coral to handle 2.3 inches of SLR per decade. To build new reefs. As if they do that.

Just stop feeding them plastic would help.https://www.ecori.org/narragansett-bay/2019/6/27/researchers-discover-microplastics-pose-deadly-threat-to-corals
“[a] published study that found corals will choose to eat plastic over natural food sources. Unsurprisingly, it’s not good for their health, as it can lead to illness and death from pathogenic microbes attached to microscopic plastics. It also adds to the stress already being applied to coral reefs worldwide, by acidifying and warming oceans, other pollution sources, development, and harmful fishing practices, such as dynamiting and bleaching to capture fish for aquariums.”

But the corals have handled 0.6 to 0.8 inches per decade. Go double check the tidal gage record of Brest and Hawaii. No acceleration of SL rise to be found. Hawaii rise actually decelerates. Besides, if we keep the big fish populations at the coral beds happy and proliferating the coral will thrive – see Cuba and Marshall island examples. Shark and grouper size fish excrements are apparently providing the needed fertilization and health.

“For example, the denial of anthropogenic climate change, dismissed without counter-evidence as ‘fake science’, has resulted in the international agreement on climate change losing universal acceptance and its impact on the level of global warming is likely to have disastrous consequences worldwide in the twenty-first century.”

These people went to college. Denial drives it. They said so. Denial doesn’t drive it. No one wants to do anything that makes much of a difference. No one from the left that has a chance of doing anything, will see anything they do get done make a difference. Germany doesn’t make a difference and they tried three time as hard with about zero resistance. In about 40 years it’s likely we will have disastrous consequences, because of denial. They can’t even describe the problem. They don’t understand it and it’s lame to a high degree to blame it on denial. The knowledge crisis is them not understanding the situation.

(http://bit.ly/2NfdWba ) 2,000 years of North Atlantic climate change and considers how ocean circulation may have contributed to historical climate shifts

has a lot of information that takes a while to assimilate. A selection out of 53 pp:

Further north, in the Fram Strait, three independent SST time series exist (Fig. 4a,b) [Bonnet et al., 2010; Spielhagen et al., 2011]. Those based on planktonic foraminifera show relative stability for most of the Common Era and only a rapid increase since the industrial era [Spielhagen et al., 2011](Figure 4a), which is argued to reflect enhanced advection of Atlantic waters into the Arctic.On the other hand, SST estimates from the same site based on dinocyst assemblages show a long-term cooling trend, accompanied by a reduction in salinity, over the last 2000 years [Bonnet et al., 2010]. This recent diverging trend in the Fram Strait,as also shown in Figure 10b, may be real or potentially reflect habitat bias in the different proxies or post-depositional calcium carbonate preservation changes [Zamelczyk et al., 2013]. Over the same period, the influence of drift ice increased at the Fram Strait [Werner et al., 2011b](Fig. 4c). So, apart from the planktonic foraminifera proxies in the Fram Strait, all surface parameters appear to show a pattern consistent with continuous millennial cooling that culminated in the LIA, or in some cases continued until the 20th century (Fig. 4). This is consistent with the previously observed global SST trend, possibly as a result of accumulated volcanic forcing [McGregor et al., 2015]or decreased northern hemisphere summer insolation.In summary, surface reconstructions of the Atlantic inflow in the Nordic Seas largely reveal a millennial scale cooling and increased drift ice (Fig. 4). Additionally, the higher resolution records reveal centennial changes, with the most noticeable being the surface cooling and increased drift ice at around 1300–1450 years CE around the MCA–LIA transition (Fig. 4c–f, Figure 10a).

they have a refreshingly complex attitude toward model results:

As imperfect representations of the real world and its variability, however, climate models present certain limitations to bear in mind. While the incorporation of the Paleo Model Intercomparison Project phase 4 (PMIP4) into the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 [CMIP6; Kageyama et al., 2018] ensured that the same models are used for past, present, and future simulations, long-term transient simulations pose limits to model resolution and cannot be carried out with the most advanced models. This comes at the expense of resolving less accurately several
potentially key oceanic processes which play a significant role in the climate of the North Atlantic, such as turbulent mixing and deep convection, or overflow exchanges between the Nordic Seas and the subpolar North Atlantic,. Particularly relevant for the study of this region is the presence of mean state model biases affecting the Gulf Stream extension [Eden et al., 2004; Schoonover et al., 2016] and the upper-ocean temperatures of the Subpolar Gyre (SPG) region [Keeley et al., 2012; Menary et al., 2015; Sgubin et al., 2017]. Such biases can, in turn, influence the representation of Atlantic multidecadal variability in the North Atlantic [Drews and Greatbatch, 2016] and its main driver, the AMOC, and thus contribute to the diversity in the underlying model mechanisms [Buckley and Marshall, 2015]. Last millennium simulations are also subject to uncertainties in external forcings, such as the timing and magnitude of the major volcanic eruptions [Sigl et al., 2015; Swingedouw et al., 2017] or the amplitude of the changes in solar irradiance [Jungclaus et al., 2017]. There is also evidence that internal climate variability contributed substantially to North Atlantic regional climate changes in the past millennia [Goosse et al., 2005; Moreno-Chamarro et al., 2017b], which hampers any direct model–data comparisons. Furthermore, model-based inferences about the climate response to external forcings are subject to considerable uncertainty given that the ensemble size required to isolate forced variability is not known a priori and is probably larger than recent experiments have afforded [Deser et al., 2012].

Dr. Curry ==> The item Controversy: Cold kills more than heat, says CDC [link]” links to a 2014 Washington Post story. Just wondering if the controversy has popped up in the recent news?

In 2015, Gasparini and Guo [ paper ] found the same as the CDC — with a twist — Moderate Cold is the biggest killer by far.

Eunice Lo et al (June 2019) claim keeping global temperature rise to 1.5 instead of 2.0 will save thousands of lives in the US — in fact, their claim of lives saved per city is higher than the actual deaths attributable to high temperatures for the entire nation.

Somebody is playing silly bunnies with this topic — a lot of the trouble is caused by these studies looking at “cause of death” codes (database lookup) for “heat related deaths” and also at “all cause deaths”. One study looked at All Cause Deaths for up to three weeks after very hot day…..

All Cause Mortality is an invalid measure for any proximate cause. Hot days do no cause accidental poisoning, factory floor industrial accidents, murders, suicides, or a myriad of other types of death that are included in “all cause”.

I am working on this idea and trying to get some answers from some of the authors of these studies — so far — no replies.

aaron ==> From a public health, societal, point of view, it is the gross number of deaths and their causes that matter. If human society wants to prevent excess temperature-related deaths, it will get more “lives saved” for its efforts by dealing with moderate cold deaths than worrying about extreme heat deaths.

JCH ==> I have yet to see a good paper explaining why Moderate Cold kills more people. Certainly though, areas where intense cold is expected have better insulated homes and people are generally more prepared for the cold.
There was a report of a healthy young man dying of hypothermia, sitting at a picnic table, along the Appalachian Trail a number of years ago. He had gone for a vigorous quick march and sat down in the evening chill, and died of hypothermia.

“More significant than the erosion of scientific trust, the weaponization of science is profoundly illiberal, and so undermines the political process itself. It betrays a cynicism about the capacity of open debate to secure proper resolution of political disputes. What gradually takes the place of open debate is a power play to exclude our opponents as legitimate participants in the political process, usually by labeling them foes of reason.”

We could guess who is excluding whom in general? People get called all kinds of names. They get mobbed online. Some get demonetized. These things happen. Who would want their science to be any part of that? No better than an online Twitter mob.

“One out-of-the-box approach would be for health agencies to start including confidence levels in their statements about scientific research. These are simple qualitative measures—low, medium, high, very high—that provide a quick relative sense of how well founded in evidence a conclusion or recommendation is. And they have the advantage of already being commonly used internally by the medical community, in, for instance, some CDC and WHO documents.”

Like AR5 from the IPCC. Or one study and its headline. When you attempt to drive the political process with headlines, you have short term rhetoric and what gets done? We have oil and energy companies. Who have the long view. They’re still here. Weaponized science is no match for them. We just get ineffective charlatans. Over the medium term we got ethanol. Hand it over to the corporations. How could they have done any worse?

For the first time, astrophysicists have used artificial intelligence techniques to generate complex 3D simulations of the universe. The results are so fast, accurate and robust that even the creators aren’t sure how it all works.

“We can run these simulations in a few milliseconds, while other ‘fast’ simulations take a couple of minutes,” says study co-author Shirley Ho, a group leader at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City and an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “Not only that, but we’re much more accurate.”

The speed and accuracy of the project, called the Deep Density Displacement Model, or D3M for short, wasn’t the biggest surprise to the researchers. The real shock was that D3M could accurately simulate how the universe would look if certain parameters were tweaked — such as how much of the cosmos is dark matter — even though the model had never received any training data where those parameters varied.

If AI is such a game changer in terms of both speed and accuracy – and unexpected solution finding – in astronomy, then presumably we should expect to see AI playing a big role in climate modelling.

Except – we may not. Because climate science, as we all know, is … well, special. “Unexpected solution finding” might be an attractive prospect for most scientific enterprises. But in climate science it’s the last thing that they want. Climate modeler’s hair would indeed stand on end in terror at the prospect. The last thing they want is real answers to any questions. And even less, answers that are unexpected. Remember, in climate science, the answers are determined first, before the methods and data are created.

So don’t expect AI to start popping up any time soon in climate science.

The must-read Ted Nordhaus article is pointless because it does not give weight to the most likely outcome of the argument between sceptics of the science and the activists pushing their views.
The most likely outcome is that the alarmist view will not prevail. It is wrong or inadequate in several fundamental ways. Apart from this Nordhaus effort, there are too many papers that are disqualified because they ignore dissent. Economists in particular seem keen to remove dissent from consideration. It is such an easy simplification. Geoff

Nordhaus ends thus: Abundant, low carbon energy for all is a public good, and a concerted national effort by public institutions to build that infrastructure would be welcome. But the fact that even self-identified Democratic Socialists appear unwilling to call for such a thing suggests that insofar as we are going to make much progress reducing carbon emissions and addressing climate change, we will likely do so in much more incremental, partial, decentralized fashion, making prospects for deep or rapid reductions in emissions extremely unlikely. Practically, we are all neoliberals now. Some of us just haven’t realized it.

His essay sort of chastises the empty rhetoric of certain extreme liberals, and calls on everyone to think of abundant low carbon energy as “public good” like roads, bridges and nuclear power plants. He notes in passing that no actual pragmatic programs have ever satisfied environmentalists.

He is trying to straddle the divide between those who believe climate action is necessary but don’t have any practical plans, and those who essentially like capitalism, technological prowess and material wealth and don’t view CO2 as much of a problem. OR, those who think CO2 is a problem but who can’t solve it, and those who are able to solve it but don’t think it is a problem.

That is not the question, as Lysenkoism did not prevail. The question is how long the alarmist view will dominate and how much damage is going to cause.

The alarmist view has been gaining strength for 30 years already. It is accepted now as an article of faith by a significant part of the population and enjoys the good press. The new generation of politicians will be willing to go much further with climate measures and sacrifices imposed on the population.

Science has been unable to prevent the rise of alarmism, and there is no reason to think it can stop it. The alarmist movement selects what it needs and ignores what it doesn’t support it, even from IPCC, as Pielke Jr and our host have denounced. Alarmism develops in an emotional plane where arguments have no place except to support the emotions.

At the point we have reached only nature can change the situation, and it would take decades for that even if nature decides to cool the planet, which is unlikely. Otherwise the climate alarmist movement will continue until it runs out of steam.

So far the damage inflicted by alarmism is small, mostly money wasted and lost opportunities, and this is what gives Nordhaus his false sense of security. However, as CO2 levels continue to increase more drastic measures will be implemented, affecting people’s lives.

Thanks for articulating a rational view. The power elite will avoid the facts found in a comprehensive science debate. It is too hard to explain the current state of incomplete knowledge, conflicting evidence, inadequate climate models and a faulty quality control process. Support for the truth only angers the large numbers pushing the catastrophe narrative. Maintaining the power base is more important than getting it right on public policy.

‘The authors unite a number of previously published proxy data sets to paint a picture of North Atlantic ocean circulation over the past 2,000 years. This compilation reveals details of past conditions in various regions. For example, the past 2,000 years around Greenland show progressively cooler and icier surface waters reaching the coldest conditions during the Little Ice Age’

That is troubling, as it should get warmer during each centennial solar minimum.

“The simulation showed that even a weak tidal tug of 1 meter per second every 11 years forced unstable magnetic twists to pulse with that same period. The simulated dynamo’s polarity oscillated with a 22-year period just like the real solar dynamo.”

And that is far as it can possibly go within a tidal perspective. The conflict of alternating superior and inferior conjunctions of Earth and Venus lining up with Jupiter in consecutive Schwabe cycles, giving greatly different tidal values. And the lack of explanation for the variance in cycle length and for the occurrence of centennial solar minima.
The actual timing of each sunspot cycle maximum generally within a year can be tracked by the addition of Uranus, and within centennial minimum cycles, Neptune, which becomes a surrogate for Uranus during centennial minima. It neatly plots the shorter sunspot cycles between centennial minima, averaging around 10.4 years in length through the 20th century, and the longer cycles into and out of each centennial minima.
I strongly suspect the mechanisms to involve magnetic connections to each body from the Sun, and operating via a quadrupole magnetic moment around the solar equatorial region.

“… addressing climate change, we will likely do so in much more incremental, partial, decentralized fashion, making prospects for deep or rapid reductions in emissions extremely unlikely.”

Surveys show that most American’s opinion on climate depends on the last weather event. A reasonable association. Despite conjunctions of Mars and Venus with pixie dust – greenhouse gas emissions are not convincingly exonerated of causing change now or in the future in rainfall and drought, heat extremes, expansion of the regions of cyclogenesis, AMOC or storms spiraling off the poles.

People have argued for decades for a piecemeal approach. Nitrous oxide, methane, sulfur and black carbon, CFC’s, land use, production efficiency, technology innovation…

This is not theoretical – it has been happening for decades. Past progress has been associated with economic strength – future progress depends a lot on economic development.

Quote: “This is not theoretical – it has been happening for decades.” Not decade but long centuries. From another point of view, why are the glaciers of Quelccaya melting now (fast from some 50yrs ago), and uncovering plant abruptly frozen about 5 millennia ago? Why Otzi the ice-man returned from the same chronological era? Also apparently abruptly frozen together with the surrounding flora.
Perhaps one is not to unduly bother. Tipping points are rare in occurrence – we may be so lucky; one hell of an experience.

greenhouse gas emissions are not convincingly exonerated of causing change now or in the future in rainfall and drought, heat extremes, expansion of the regions of cyclogenesis, AMOC or storms spiraling off the poles.

God hasn’t been exonerated either. It is not science’s job to exonerate possible causes but to provide evidence beyond reasonable doubt of the actual cause.

A warmer planet is a planet with a flatter equator-to-pole temperature gradient and therefore with less atmospheric activity due to a reduction in the speed of the flow of energy along that gradient. Additionally a warmer planet will have a more active water cycle further reducing the amount of energy available to drive atmospheric work.
Laliberté, F., et al. “Constrained work output of the moist atmospheric heat engine in a warming climate.” Science 347.6221 (2015): 540-543.

Simple physics suggests a warmer planet will have a decrease in many extreme weather phenomena. Paleoclimatic and modern climate observations agree.

More moisture in the atmosphere, changes in AMOC, broader regions of cyclogenesis, changes in polar annular modes, changes in patterns of global heat and drought, temperature extremes, changes in ice, cloud and biology, changes in the carbon cycle – all observed in recent decades in a hyper variable complex and dynamic system. We should take it as a scientific truth that we are changing the Earth system with little certainty as to consequences. Simple skeptic ‘physics’ notwithstanding. Grey areas of uncertainty don’t normally trouble Javier – so i take it with a ton of salt. .

And there is a broader point about rational responses that go well beyond considerations of climate change.

When we only have been measuring most variables for a few decades every change is unprecedented, but the “it must be us” conclusion is unwarranted. Infant sciences behave as infants, with a predictable lack of perspective and rationality.

The grey area extends to the whole of climate science. Not fit for the purpose of determining energy policies.

but then science is insufficient to distinguish anthropogenic from internal variability?

It is a fact that after 35 years science has been unable to approximate an answer to the question of how much warming a doubling of CO2 should produce. Therefore we don’t know how much of the observed warming is natural and how much anthropogenic. Not even an approximation.

Prospective energy policies should not be decided on climate grounds until the science matures. There is no hurry. 45 years of global warming have had a very modest effect (probably net positive) and no acceleration is being detected. We have decades to increase our knowledge and energy policies should be decided on rational criteria.

AGW – it’s about half the warming of the past 40 years – can be solved. Electricity is 25% of the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. A multi-gas and aerosol strategy is required – carbon dioxide, CFC’s, nitrous oxides, methane, black carbon and sulfate. ith pngoing decreases in carbon intensity and increases in efficiency and productivity. And technical innovation across sectors – energy, transport, industry, residential and agriculture and forestry. Innovation is the source of productivity growth.

There are ways to a bright future for the planet, its peoples and its wild places – but these need to be applied in a broad context of economics and democracy, population, development, technical innovation, land use and the environment.

Reflexive skeptic opposition to whatever they think the other side is saying is clearly an irrational basis for policy.

And arguing that we do something when the consequences are unknown is clearly a bit mad in my opinion.

arguing that we do something when the consequences are unknown is clearly a bit mad in my opinion.

Read more history. Humans have always acted without knowing the consequences. It may be mad but that is how evolution and progress have come to happen. And changing our energy system to a new one that we don’t know if it can support us based on incomplete and faulty climate information just follows the pattern.

Humans are a planetary experiment. We’ve been altering the environment on a global scale since day one. From the megafaunal extinction to the clearing of the huge forest that covered the whole of Europe, or the change of entire ecosystems through the use of fire.

There is no evidence that the increase in GHGs is negative, particularly for CO2. The only answer is more science and more knowledge.

Similar fears were brought about the dangers of recombinant DNA technology in 1974 resulting in a moratorium in the USA. The main result is that it allowed European researchers that did not have that moratorium to catch up to the new technology developed in the US.

The rational answer is to increase our knowledge until we get the answer. Energy policies correspond to society to determine, and if low emissions sources are adequate I have nothing to say about that.

The problem is our new energy sources greatly increase the price of electricity, and that creates a clear systemic risk, much more certain than any climatic problem from the increase in CO2.

The underlying principle is easy even if the process details are not. It is like in a warmer world the water cycle should be more active as there is more energy available to make it run. This leads to the prediction that globally precipitations should increase with temperature even if regionally that is not the case. This is supported by observations that the Eocene was extremely wet:
Clementz, M.T. and Sewall, J.O., 2011. Latitudinal gradients in greenhouse seawater δ18O: evidence from Eocene sirenian tooth enamel. Science, 332 (6028), pp.455-458.http://science.sciencemag.org/content/332/6028/455.short“The Eocene greenhouse climate state has been linked to a more vigorous hydrologic cycle at mid- and high latitudes… Eocene low latitudes were extremely wet.

Despite simple physical principles agreeing with observations, alarmists are predicting severe droughts as a general consequence of global warming. Some countries are expected to desertify due to climate change, like mine, yet the data does not support it.

More moisture in the lower atmosphere, changes in AMOC, broader regions of cyclogenesis, changes in polar annular modes, changes in patterns of global heat and drought, temperature extremes, changes in ice, cloud and biology, changes in the carbon cycle – all observed in recent decades in a hyper variable complex and dynamic system. We should take it as a scientific truth that this is all part and parcel of a warm AMO phase, especially the decline in low cloud cover.
Fixed.

Javier: Simple physics suggests a warmer planet will have a decrease in many extreme weather phenomena.

Simple physics really suggests a warmer planet will have more energy to send to space and that will change many extreme weather events and it will not cause a decrease in overall weather events. Simple physics did not suggest warmer would cause less extreme events, simple climate scientists suggested this junk. I do not know why people promote stuff that does not measure up to common sense.

Models can’t be trusted to give an answer to the question of how much of the warming is AGW vs natural.

All cooling and warming is natural. CO2 is a trace gas and if a tiny increase of a trace gas causes a tiny bit of warming, it is still natural, but too little to be measured or separated from the more robust natural self correcting natural cycles.

Read more history. Humans have always acted without knowing the consequences. It may be mad but that is how evolution and progress have come to happen. And changing our energy system to a new one that we don’t know if it can support us based on incomplete and faulty climate information just follows the pattern.

It is much worse than that, there is a lot of data from the renewable energy projects around the world that have failed and data from people who paid the least for reliable electricity who now pay the most for unreliable electricity.

A warmer planet is a planet with a flatter equator-to-pole temperature gradient and therefore with less atmospheric activity due to a reduction in the speed of the flow of energy along that gradient. Additionally a warmer planet will have a more active water cycle further reducing the amount of energy available to drive atmospheric work.

Really wrong, it is snowing more this year because the Arctic and near arctic oceans are warm and thawed. This provides more energy to drive atmospheric work. I do not know if any of you ever actually think.

This statement is really wrong, where did it come from? More active water cycle reducing available energy? Please go think again!
Additionally a warmer planet will have a more active water cycle further reducing the amount of energy available to drive atmospheric work.

How can anyone be that totally wrong and not even suspect it does not make any sense. That is not how things work. Warmer is related to more energy and more energy can cause more stuff. Please think this out. Clearly you do not yet even suspect.

Javier
“A warmer planet is a planet with a flatter equator-to-pole temperature gradient and therefore with less atmospheric activity due to a reduction in the speed of the flow of energy along that gradient. Additionally a warmer planet will have a more active water cycle further reducing the amount of energy available to drive atmospheric work.”

This is a theory, not fact.
Increased tropical convection = increased equator to pole atmospheric transport and most altitudes.
The Arctic warms (the current warming period >1980) due to increased displacement of atmosphere pole-ward. Papers referred to in Judith’s weekly list support this phenomena. This represents most of the modern era warming. Arctic SIE, volume and Greenland melt is 90% due to displaced atmospheric intrusion.
The outcome in the SH is the reverse, most notably during April to November where barriers increase causing cooling to occurr >55 degree’s south, confirmed in CERES data 2000 to current.

The “warmer planet” is primarily caused by increased tropical convection displacement. There is much to learn regarding the mechanisms that actually control the global average temperature during years of high convection.
It is not possible to do this topic justice in a few sentences.
With regards
Martin

The Arctic warms (the current warming period >1980) due to increased displacement of atmosphere pole-ward.

The data shows the Arctic warms in winter, not in summer. Check it here:http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Individual yearshttp://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n_anomaly.uk.php
and only since ~2000. Look at the 1990s in both links.
This is an important issue that I have not seen reflected in the literature and that casts many doubts about the Arctic amplification narrative. Why in winters? Why since 2000 and not before? I have my own ideas about that.

The expansion of the Hadley cells and tropicalization of sub-tropics is accompanied by a contraction of the polar cells and a poleward displacement of the polar front.
Villalba, R., et al. “Unusual Southern Hemisphere tree growth patterns induced by changes in the Southern Annular Mode.” Nature Geoscience 5.11 (2012): 793.

These changes are a manifestation of the flattening of the latitudinal temperature gradient that started at the Little Ice Age, when it had reached its biggest difference in the Holocene. They must necessarily result in the reduction of atmospheric activity and the proxies show that. Every study of past storminess identifies the LIA as a period when storminess was higher than present:https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/02/06/storminess-of-the-little-ice-age/
Sorrel, P., et al. “Persistent non-solar forcing of Holocene storm dynamics in coastal sedimentary archives.” Nature Geoscience 5.12 (2012): 892.
Costas, S., et al. “Windiness spells in SW Europe since the last glacial maximum.” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 436 (2016): 82-92.
Degeai, J-P., et al. “Major storm periods and climate forcing in the Western Mediterranean during the Late Holocene.” Quaternary Science Reviews 129 (2015): 37-56.
Trouet, V., Scourse, J. D., & Raible, C. C. (2012). North Atlantic storminess and Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation during the last Millennium: Reconciling contradictory proxy records of NAO variability. Global and Planetary Change, 84, 48-55.
This last article says in the abstract:“Such an increase in cyclone intensity could have resulted from the steepening of the meridional temperature gradient as the poles cooled more strongly than the Tropics from the MCA into the LIA.”

Starting to look better, isn’t it?

Then we have the observation that wind speed has been globally decreasing with global warming:
McVicar, T. R., et al. “Global review and synthesis of trends in observed terrestrial near-surface wind speeds: Implications for evaporation.” Journal of Hydrology 416 (2012): 182-205.“We analysed 148 studies reporting terrestrial u trends from across the globe (with uneven and incomplete spatial distribution and differing periods of measurement) and found that the average trend was –0.014 m s–1 a–1 for studies with more than 30 sites observing data for more than 30 years, which confirmed that stilling was widespread.”

It appears scientists don’t have a clue why winds are stilling:
Vautard, R., et al. “Northern Hemisphere atmospheric stilling partly attributed to an increase in surface roughness.” Nature geoscience 3.11 (2010): 756.
Despite this being exactly what you would expect from a reduction in the latitudinal temperature gradient and the decrease in storminess.

It has implications about wind energy in the future, but it also raises the question: How could you expect more extreme atmospheric phenomena with global warming if the speed of the wind is decreasing?

Climate scientists believe they have all figured out with their models so they are not connecting the dots to get the figure. The few that do are being ignored because their results don’t fit the dominant narrative.

Javier: This is an important issue that I have not seen reflected in the literature and that casts many doubts about the Arctic amplification narrative. Why in winters? Why since 2000 and not before? I have my own ideas about that.

It is not consistent with the data. Arctic SIE declined rapidly between 1996-2007 and it has been stable since. There is no increased summer melting in the Arctic despite significant winter warming since 2007.

In fact I plotted SIE maximum to minimum change (ice melt) a year ago, and it does not support that the melt can be responsible for the temperature changes.

javier: It is not consistent with the data. Arctic SIE declined rapidly between 1996-2007 and it has been stable since. There is no increased summer melting in the Arctic despite significant winter warming since 2007.

Thanks for the graph.

A clarification: Are you saying that Winter Arcitc Sea Ice extent has not declined over the last 4 decades? Before 1996-1997? Why is the time since 2007 especially important?

Comparing the latent heat to the tangible heat, would you expect equal amounts of energy to produce surface warming and ice melt comparably? Not a trick question. You write lots of good stuff.

Are you saying that Winter Arcitc Sea Ice extent has not declined over the last 4 decades? Before 1996-1997? Why is the time since 2007 especially important?

No. What I am saying is that Arctic SIE decline has little relationship with Arctic 2 m air temperature.

Arctic SIE decline has two components. One is a cyclical one linked to AMO. The other one is a declining trend.

The declining trend appears to have two causes, a minor one due to the increase in temperature, and a major one due to the increase in soot.

The very warm series of years from 2014, the warmest on record, answers your question. It has been accompanied by stability to slight increase in Arctic summer SIE and lower than average summer temperature in the Arctic. If it hasn’t melted the ice, nor has increased the temperature, where has that energy gone? It can only be detected during winters, when it both slightly decreases SIE and strongly increases temperature (still way below freezing).

Anyway you look at it, it is not what was expected. I am eagerly awaiting the data for the next couple of decades. It might be full of surprises too. I don’t think Arctic amplification is understood in the least. It is already evident that the importance of albedo has been overestimated.

Javier: What I am saying is that Arctic SIE decline has little relationship with Arctic 2 m air temperature.

OK I think that changes the emphasis of your posts, but maybe not.

Javier: The underlying principle is easy even if the process details are not. It is like in a warmer world the water cycle should be more active as there is more energy available to make it run.

I agree, but I do not think it is “simple” a few years ago I wrote out calculations supporting my doubt that a 4 W/m^2 increase in down welling LWIR could power a 1K increase in global mean temp; precisely because of the extra latent heat carried up by the increase in the rate of the water cycle. I wrote it in response to the Romps et al paper about increased lightning ground strike rates predicted to follow a 1K increase in global mean surface temp.

How large, or small, the climate issue becomes in the U.S. presidential campaign may be the biggest climate policy issue on the present world’s table. So far it is looking pretty small, but these are early days.

I found the ‘Saving the Planet’ article refreshing. The concepts presented compare surprisingly close to what was considered ‘Conservationist’. Conservationism differs from environmentalism in that its goal is to conserve nature and resources for future generations. That is to say, the goal is to do this for future humans. Environmentalism appears to work to eliminate human interaction with nature, with a perspective that any interaction is unnatural.
Here in the Midwest where I live rural people are essentially all conservationist in attitude and behavior. Vacant or unused land is managed and improved for wildlife. Water sources are added. Varied land cover is created to provide habitats for varied wildlife species. This is done with a goal of conserving the amazing variety in nature for future human generations.
Contrasting conservationism, environmentalists here seem to worry more about Walmart’s plastic shopping bags and whether the local solar power generating facility is big enough. Human interaction with woodlands and wildlife habitats is considered only as a negative force. It appears that from their perspective, humans are apart from and a plague on nature.
I am human and find no guilt in wishing for a prosperous and happy future for ALL humans.

I think I should add that from a Conservationist perspective, preserving a resource does not imply it is never utilized. Conservation is to avoid squandering a resource and to minimize any negative effects of utilizing it. A resource that can never be used is not a resource.

A minimum atmospheric temperature, or tropopause, occurs at a pressure of around 0.1 bar in the atmospheres of Earth1, Titan2, Jupiter3, Saturn4, Uranus and Neptune4, despite great differences in atmospheric composition, gravity, internal heat and sunlight. In all of these bodies, the tropopause separates a stratosphere with a temperature profile that is controlled by the absorption of short-wave solar radiation, from a region below characterized by convection, weather and clouds5,6. However, it is not obvious why the tropopause occurs at the specific pressure near 0.1 bar. Here we use a simple, physically based model7 to demonstrate that, at atmospheric pressures lower than 0.1 bar,https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2020?WT.feed_name=subjects_giant-planets&foxtrotcallback=true

How do tidal forces work?
Io is caught in a tug-of-war between Jupiter’s massive gravity and the smaller but precisely timed pulls from two neighboring moons that orbit further from Jupiter – Europa and Ganymede. Io orbits faster than these other moons, completing two orbits every time Europa finishes one, and four orbits for each one Ganymede makes. This regular timing means that Io feels the strongest gravitational pull from its neighboring moons in the same orbital location, which distorts Io’s orbit into an oval shape. This in turn causes Io to flex as it moves around Jupiter.

For example, as Io gets closer to Jupiter, the giant planet’s powerful gravity deforms the moon toward it and then, as Io moves farther away, the gravitational pull decreases and the moon relaxes. The flexing from gravity causes tidal heating – in the same way that you can heat up a spot on a wire coat hanger by repeatedly bending it, the flexing creates friction in Io’s interior, which generates the tremendous heat that powers the moon’s extreme volcanism.https://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/io-volcanoes-displaced.html

Ireneusz
Look what is happening in the East Pacific, three bus stops north of your Antarctic SIE image. That Antarctic SIE increases at the Atlantic corridor during hurricane activity is normal. The Antarctic SIE facing the Pacific corridor is the most exposed.

The 2019 seasonal low latitude “pressure paradigm” started rising about 23rd June, faltered with the rise of H1 Alvin which took the puff away. “Pressure” started accumulating again late June promoting Barbara’s inception and rapid intensification. We will see if convection accumulation continues to rise to sustain intensity. There is nothing for the H4 to bump into therefore it is solely reliant on atmospheric input. As always it under the control of total accumulated convection. Same pattern every year.
Regards

Here is the abstract: The heart of the scientific enterprise is a rational effort to understand the causes behind the phenomena we observe. In large-scale complex dynamical systems such as the Earth system, real experiments are rarely feasible. However, a rapidly increasing amount of observational and simulated data opens up the use of novel data-driven causal methods beyond the commonly adopted correlation techniques. Here, we give an overview of causal inference frameworks and identify promising generic application cases common in Earth system sciences and beyond. We discuss challenges and initiate the benchmark platform causeme.net to close the gap between method users and developers.

Thanks for the pointer. It helped find the complete paper at: plhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10105-3/

While I greatly share the authors’ lament that the various mathematical/computational methodologies for identifying causal relationships in data are largely terra incognita in “climate science,” IMO the ultimate advance in understanding the workings of climate system will have to come from physics.

Meanwhile, it’s noteworthy that the authors state:

Arguably, identifying the absence of a causal link, implying that a physical mechanism is unlikely24, is a more robust finding, which requires less strong assumptions…

This is particularly apropos to modern day CO2 concentrations, which have never been demonstrated to satisfy convincingly the cross-spectral conditions for so-called Granger causality.

In U.S. politics, concern about global warming is practically expressed in proposals like the Green New Deal, which I see as more likely a vote loser than a vote winner.

People have a hierarchy of concerns, some of which may be in conflict. On the face of it, lots of people regarding global warming as a serious problem should translate into votes for politicians who promise to address it, but if those politicians fail to convince on things that are more important to voters, but ‘climate skeptic’ politicians perform better in this regard, then the ‘serious problem’ rapidly becomes politically irrelevant.

A lot of skeptic wishful thinking here. Political advantage is available to the grouping with pragmatic climate policy. That’s not the GND. And even 100 or 200 basis points matter in the balance of power.

I’m not sure it succeeds as an example of ‘climate pragmatism’, if that is what you intended.

The interviewer (Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of The New Yorker) proves herself to be insane in her very first statement (“Climate change is the most pressing political issue in the world”). Only an executive editor of The New Yorker (along with very few others) could afford to be so detached from reality that she thinks the ‘sujet de jour’ in the salons she attends reflect the concerns and interests of the rest of the world.

Even more impressive were the meandering pronouncements of her interlocutor that occasionally hinted at sense, but then steered well clear of it. His conclusion (when stricken by a bout of Trump Derangement Syndrome) that, in fact, climate change doesn’t matter at all in the grand scheme of things (at least looking far enough forward that it might affect his grandchildren) was entirely expected. However, that is not exactly what I thought you were advertising :-)

The essential point was that the GND is not pragmatic. No nuclear according to the interview.
Most Americans favor action – they want it to be practical.

“To provide [electricity] in today’s world, an ‘advanced reactor’ must improve over existing reactors in the following 4-core objectives. It must produce significantly less costly, cost-competitive clean electricity, be safer, produce significantly less waste and reduce proliferation risk. It is not sufficient to excel at one without regard to the others.” Dr. Christina Back, Vice President, Nuclear Technologies and Materials for General Atomics, May 2016 testimony before the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the status of advanced nuclear technologies.

I agree with you on SMRs and soil/biome restoration/engineering. On the latter, I wonder if you’ve come across the Science paper from ETH Zürich published today that proposes a practical program of tree planting that would offset human CO2 emission with a trillion trees (titled, “The global tree restoration potential” – https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76).

The importance of the study is the identification of land areas that are available for planting on this scale without touching agricultural or residential land. The paper proposes tree planting at various densities, with some extremely valuable hot-spots having the potential for close to 100% density.

I followed one of your earlier links to environmental restoration projects in the DRC, which according to the Swiss study could on its own provide up to 25% of the required land area for the target 1 trillion trees. Interestingly, the study of ‘browning/greening’ in the satellite era that I linked to in a previous conversation identified the DRC as a global black spot. If you knew nothing of political geography, but merely had the satellite greening/browning imagery, you could easily discern that unfortunate county’s border.

I came to learn of the Science paper from a news report on the BBC World Service this morning. The journalist interviewing one of paper’s authors did not seem at all excited or happy. Indeed, there was a controlled but unmistakable tone of anger and resentment. That’s understandable – having planned a career based on the pecuniary prospects for professional scolding, I can see why she would be hurt and aggrieved. Pragmatically, a way must be found to provide such individuals with six or seven figure salaries or they will make such a fuss that progress will be impossible.

As usual many great and thought provoking papers.
This is the most powerful climate commentary – let the actual science in the field speak for itself.
Sometimes I take a break from climate related sites and visit Science Daily for similarly wide ranging research news. This week there is an important piece on a major event in evolutionary history 170 million years ago (mid Jurassic): marine plankton evolved the ability to calcify (previously calcification was only in multicellular marine fauna near coasts. Now biological calcification spread across the entire oceans with big biological and geological consequences:

– The rise of calcifying plankton stabilised the chemical composition of the ocean and provided the conditions for one of the most prominent diversifications of marine life in Earth’s history.

– This was a Gaia event. The chalky mass at the ocean floor (from sinking diatoms and dinoflagellates) helps to balance out the acidity of the ocean and, with that balance in place, organisms are less at the mercy of short-term perturbations of ocean chemistry than they might have been previously. So living organisms are modifying and stabilising their environment to their advantage.

-The emergence of calcium carbonate-secreting plankton lifted constraints on the evolution of other marine organisms. As a result, life in the ocean has diversified to levels far beyond what existed before.

– The emergence of calcium carbonate-secreting plankton ensured that the evolutionary impact of episodes of severe climate changes, and resulting ocean acidification, was less severe than comparable events earlier in Earth history.

Note that all of the above happened at global temperatures of both atmosphere and ocean 5-10 degrees C warmer than today. Doesn’t sound too catastrophic to me. And plankton calcification protected against ocean acidification under conditions of CO2 above 1000 ppm.

I’m sure those same calcified plankton are still able today to protect the marine ecosystem from “acidification” under CO2 concentrations in air that are a mere 400-500 ppm.

It’s hard to find any important palaeo-history of the biosphere that does not refute the CO2 warming / acidification scare.

Not too surprising. Just as research is reported at CO2 science showing that over the past seven decades the intrinsic water use efficiency of juniper and spruce trees on the southeastern Tibetan Plateau have increased by 20% and 14%, respectively, courtesy of the approximate 72 ppm rise in atmospheric CO2 over this period.

I had a look at this earlier. It applies in light or nitrogen limited regions. The more common limitation to vegetative growth is water. But in context the significant factor in the global carbon cycle is net primary production. The difference between photosynthesis and respiration. And we all know how good warmth is for heterotrophs.

Thanks for your informative comments. These are just more evidence that global warming and increased CO2 concentration is beneficial for ecosystems.

Life thrive much better (higher productivity and more carbon tied up in the biosphere) when the planet is warmer and higher CO2 concentrations. The evidence is clear. Cherry picked examples of species and habitats that are disadvantaged are examples of selection bias. Overall, ecosystems benefit from higher CO2 and higher GMST.

Unmistakably.
Further on the same topic, in “Why marine phytoplankton calcify”, Fanny Monteiro et al (2016) show that one of the major mineralised phytoplankton, coccolithophores, were at their peak of abundance, diversity and maximum size in the warm Cretaceous. They have declined in abundance and diversity with Tertiary and Quaternary cooling.

“Rather than a consequence of a temporal decoupling of evolutionary innovations between fungi and plants, Paleozoic coal abundance was likely the result of a unique combination of everwet tropical conditions and extensive depositional systems during the assembly of Pangea.”

I noted the Forbes article linked in the tweet above on decarbonization of the power sector. We don’t need to talk about nuclear – we need cost competitive energy sources. Apart from that – the errors are legion.

Most Earth system science – 97% – fundamentally recognizes the role of greenhouse gases in climate. Much of it misses decadal to millennial variability – including models. Much of it doesn’t. Earth system science suggests that climate is more sensitive to small changes than imagined by Horatio. To imagine that we can predict with any precision a planetary response to a quanta of emissions is nonsense.

But even then electricity and heat is just 1/4 of the problem. Reducing emissions here by 30-40% by 2030 is not either possible or much of a reduction in net emissions.

I checked her hypothesis out. It has a serious problem. The data she is assimilating belongs to solar cycles 21 to 24 and therefore is data that goes only in the direction of decreasing solar activity. That skews the result towards continuing the trend. She is not even aware of that.

I don’t think SC25 will have less activity than SC24. Secular solar cycles point that minimum solar activity took place in 2008-2009, and has been on the increase since. The present solar minimum is having more activity than the SC23-24 minimum supporting that interpretation.

Don’t be sorry, Ren. I have analyzed all 24 solar minima since 1750. To know how a minimum is going to be the best way is to check the rate of activity decrease. The faster the activity decreases the shorter the minimum.

The rate of activity decrease of SC24-25 minimum is very similar to those of SC4-5, SC13-14, SC14-15, and SC16-17. Those are the true analogues. SC23-24 had a slower rate of activity decrease, and therefore the present solar minimum is likely to be shorter and with more activity than the previous one.

In my opinion, the solar minimum as defined by SILSO has already taken place, and we are just waiting for confirmation.

This graph is current (with June data), using a 9-month boxcar filter that is more responsive (and noisy) than the 13-month boxcar filter that SILSO uses to define minima and maxima in solar activity.

Jan Alvestad of Solen agrees with me on this. His Monthly solar cycle data at the bottom of the page:http://www.solen.info/solar/
shows his current solar minimum candidate using SILSO filter is January 2019. A year ago I predicted February 2019 in an article at WUWT.

Javier: “Don’t be sorry, Ren. I have analyzed all 24 solar minima since 1750. ” You MUST have used the SSN since the radio flux is not known since 1750. And the SSN say: the minimum of SC24 has only 30% of the SSB-activity of the SC23 minimum up to now. Stay consistent!

the minimum of SC24 has only 30% of the SSB-activity of the SC23 minimum up to now.

It is the “up to now” that is a problem. As I have shown minima have all sort of different spans, so any comparison that relies on a time alignment has the problem that constitutes an apple to oranges comparison. You are comparing a long cycle, SC23, to a short one, SC24.

If you care to look at the “13-month smoothed monthly total sunspot number” from SILSO at:http://www.sidc.be/silso/DATA/SN_ms_tot_V2.0.txt
You will see that SC23-24 minimum reached a lowest value of 2.2 monthly sunspots in Dec 2008.
The SC24-25 minimum has reached a lowest value of 6.0 monthly sunspots. Then, so far the SC24-25 minimum has almost three times more sunspots and is therefore more active, not less.

You are betting that the current solar minimum will continue decreasing its activity. It is not a good bet as it is not supported by 10.7 cm flux as I told you, that has been on the increase since its minimum last November. The current solar minimum will not go below 4 monthly sunspots and it might not even go below 5, so it is bound to be significantly more active than the past solar minimum.

“Doing so is vital, as the future evolution of the global mean temperature may hold surprises on both the warm and cold ends of the spectrum due entirely to internal variability that lie well outside the envelope of a steadily increasing global mean temperature.” https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008GL037022

CO2 is much better returned to soils and ecosystems as organic carbon than in the atmosphere. There are real solutions to environmental conservation and food security – but they are not to be found in shallow skeptic memes.

If you only consider the temperatures recorded since thermometers were invented, temperatures have been steadily increasing, about 130 years

If you consider the temperatures over the last ten thousand years, we are colder than most of those years.

if you consider the temperatures over the past fifty million years, we are colder than most of those years.

If you consider the temperatures over the past one hundred thousand years, we are warmer than the coldest parts of the last ice age.

What exactly do people plan to accomplish by using CO2 as a control knob to stop the natural climate change that has always happened that was not following CO2 changes, but leading CO2 changes.

Chicken Little is alive and well and in charge of climate change alarmist schemes to scare people into giving power and money to people who promise to save them from any future disaster that will help chicken little live like a Chicken Queen with houses and cars and airplanes that regular people cannot have because it will cause disasters.

Understand and adapt to climate change, do not pretend we can control climate change with changing the atmosphere by taking away one molecule of ten thousand molecules.

Does any alarmist even suspect how that would be a waste and a crime to get people to give up the good things that come from low cost abundant energy doing stuff that makes life worse for all but the super rich who are getting richer selling the green new stuff that fails to measure up to promises.

Politics disguised as science: when to doubt a scientific consensus [link]

Your best bet is to look at the process that produced, defends and transmits the supposed consensus. I don’t know of any complete list of signs of suspicion. But here’s a checklist to decide when you can, even should, doubt a scientific “consensus,” whatever the subject. One of these signs may be enough to give pause. If they start to pile up, then it’s wise to be leery.

There are risks and rational responses. Electricity is 25% of the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. A multi-gas and aerosol strategy is required – carbon dioxide. CFC’s, nitrous oxides, methane, black carbon and sulfate. Along with ongoing decreases in carbon intensity and increases in efficiency and productivity. And technical innovation across sectors – energy, transport, industry, residential and agriculture and forestry.

Yes radiative physics is science but what is the atmospheric response?

A certain Hungarian ex-employee of NASA could help you with that.
He is the only person who tested the atmospheric thermodynamic reaction to increased CO2 with experimental data (radiosondes) rather than computer models, and was punished accordingly.

I think the above overlaps with the climate debate. It’s the way the way people are framed. Each side would rather the other one look like wackos. But the recent lockstep on the GND from 20 or so people running for President makes one wonder? As a binary choice, the GND makes more sense. But not with a more nuanced situation.

What’s the impact of #clouds on uncertainties in future #Greenland melt and sea level contribution? [link]

What a complicated mess.. Go look at actual ice core data that covers a hundred thousand years. Every time it gets warmer, ice accumulation gets more and it gets cold after that. Every time it gets colder, ice accumulation gets less and it gets warm after that. The clouds change how ever much it takes to produce the changes that show up in the ice cores. Greenland ice is always flowing into the oceans and is always thawing. when oceans are warmer, ice accumulation is more than the ice loss. when oceans are colder, ice accumulation is less than the ice loss.

There is ice core data to prove this, no models are needed, just inspect actual available data. If you use models that disagree with actual data, throw the models away as fast as you can. Whatever clouds that are needed to cause the events that do happen, will be there at the time and place that are needed. watch what happens and try to model what happens, if you get that wrong, do not try to predict the future with stuff that cannot match the past.

JAVIER…
Here perhaps lies a clue to your riddle of arctic warming. SSTs in the northern hemisphere are high in the summer time and low in winter.* My (stab in the dark) guess is that with the reduction in sea ice after 2000, we’re getting more venting of the oceans. Winter time is the venting season, so to speak, because of the greater temperature differential between sea and air. Thus, as SSTs fall, air temps then rise. Mine is but a clueless guess (but perhaps a good starting point for discussion)…

*if you look closely, the same holds true in the southern hemisphere albeit with a lesser amplitude.

Yes, the heat loss from the ocean has probably contributed to winter warming in the Arctic. However the loss of winter sea-ice (~ 2.5%/decade) is too small to explain the great increase in winter surface temperature, particularly in the 21st century.

In the end it is clear that the heat producing winter warming in the Arctic is being advected from lower latitudes. While the ocean is doing its part, as you note, the bulk of the energy is being transported by the atmosphere.

There are several interesting questions. One is why the atmosphere is transporting more energy to the Arctic since about 2000 and not before. Most of the warming took place in the 80s and 90s. Another one is the consequence. More energy to the Arctic in winter means more energy lost by the planet. I do not think it is a coincidence that the warming of the Arctic in winter coincides with the Pause in global warming. If that is the case then climate scientists have the whole Arctic amplification story backwards. It is cooling the planet, or at least preventing more warming, and not a cause for alarm.

In the end it is clear that the heat producing winter warming in the Arctic is being advected from lower latitudes. While the ocean is doing its part, as you note, the bulk of the energy is being transported by the atmosphere.

i wonder if the reason for this has anything to do with the increase in (walker cell) trade wind speeds along the equator. The more those winds kick up, the greater the advection to the poles hence the greater the venting done at the poles. (perhaps trenberth’s missing heat is in outer space) i know that north/south winds have stilled over time while wind speeds have picked up east/west along the equator. But, what do we know about north/south wind speeds specifically over the pacific ocean?

Javier, i spent some time a while back running the above (top) graph by folks to see if i could get any answers*. Nada. There must be some basic logical explanation for what is going on. Quite the puzzle, it is…

*oz4caster was one of those folks & he kindly made the graph that you see there

I wonder if it is related to the Argo program. It really marked a change in the quality and coverage of ocean temperature measurements.

But the yearly average of the data shows NH SST data follows what happened to land surface temperature data: The pause and the big El Niño of 2014-12016.

The seasonal changes in SST are surely due to insolation changes. The ocean accumulates solar energy much more than land. When I was a boy it puzzled me that the Mediterranean was warmer in November than in May.

Both land datasets are lock step until the year 2000 or so and then they diverge. (for whatever reason crutm isn’t updated til present so i used hadcrut) Ditto with SSTs. You probably know this already; what do you think? AGW? Space Aliens? (Planet X?… ☹️) Or is it just Mann made?

Both land datasets are lock step until the year 2000 or so and then they diverge.

It is the same I was telling you. From 2000 the Arctic starts to warm during winters affecting NH average surface temperature, but not SH average surface temperature. Despite below freezing temperature, the warming in °C is staggering due to the low enthalpy capacity of very cold very dry polar air. So the change is a big number even if the energy is not. That introduces an important upward bias on NH data, and even global data.

In my opinion the datasets are correct. HadCRUT doesn’t even include all the Arctic warming. But also in my opinion not AGW and not driven by GHGs. During the Arctic winter GHGs are irrelevant. All the energy makes it out as LWR regardless of the time it takes, as there is no incoming SWR. It is natural. Natural climate change. A beast that was believed to be extinct.

The result is the pause, that is still alive, but masked by the strong El Niño. It should become evident in just 2 years if I am correct.

Just as a footnote, i once live on the island of Maui. What i was told were trade winds would kick up around noon time (which is how walker cell trades work; they follow the sun). Maui, though, is not on the equator. It’s just south of the tropic of cancer. And yet these trade winds were very strong, unlike hadley cell trades (which are just strong enough to pin clouds to the northeast side of the island). i’ve always been curious as to just how far north these walker winds could be felt given that they were as strong as they were on maui. And what impact that stronger winds in recent years would have on climate on the whole. A lot? A little? or somewhere in between? They made for some pretty good wind surfing off the kehei coast. Although you would never catch me on one of those things (beside the fact that i was always afraid of getting bit by a shark)…

“My favorite case so far is when Trump tweeted that the climate change scare was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. As always, it is the elements of truth that make this so funny. That the climate scare has the elements of a hoax is undeniable. That the resulting destruction of the U.S. industrial base will benefit China is also pretty clear.

But it was a joke. I cannot count the number of times that I have seen this joke repeated by the left wing media as some sort of factual claim by the President.”

Some Heartland institute and CFACT folks went to Beijing in 2014 to foster the myth of Chinese disbelief in mainstream climate science.

Here is the Chinese Academy of Science’s response to Heartland’s Beijing P-R stunt:

“Politics disguised as science: when to doubt a scientific consensus [link]”

My three favorites from the article:

1) When different claims get bundled together.
The world is getting warmer. It’s all due to us. Civilization needs to be rearranged to make this happen. An appointed few will lead us to our salvation.

7) When consensus is declared before it even exists. The science is settled.

8) When the subject matter seems, by its nature, to resist consensus.
“The evidence is scattered and hard to track. It’s often indirect, imbedded in history and laden with theory. You can’t rerun past climate to test it.”

Many people have an internal BS detector: “something isn’t quite right”. The above three of the 12 listed came to confluence for me around climate warming and why so very (it seems) long ago, when my children came home from seeing the movie: “An Inconvenient Truth” and their descriptions of an impending catastrophe, and the only way to avoid it is… My BS detector went off. Selling my children the story of doom and its remedy is easy. They still wanted to believe in many things including simple answers to complex issues. Having slogged through tales of woe and sorrow half way through my life, although I always have hope, I just do not rely upon pixie dust.

This infographic from the Department of Energy (DOE), as displayed on the Neutron Bytes blog, describes the five most important benefits of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) as DOE now sees them:

Black Start: Can start up from a completely de-energized state without receiving power from the grid.Islanding: Can operate connected to the grid or independently.Underground Construction: Makes reactors less vulnerable to extreme weather and physical attacks.Fuel Security: Can easily store fuel on site for a decade or more without the need for an external fuel supply.Modularity: Minimizes the use of electrical parts and uses passive cooling features to safely shut down without pumps or operator intervention.

SMRs are the future of new build nuclear power in the United States. As demonstrated by the cancellation of the VC Summer expansion in South Carolina, and the massive cost and schedule overruns of Vogtle 3 & 4 in Georgia, the nuclear construction industry in the US isn’t strong enough to deliver the large unitary reactors such as the AP1000 design on cost and on schedule.

The two AP1000s at Vogtle 3 & 4 will be the last of their kind ever constructed in the US, assuming Georgia Power can even get those two completed.

NuScale LLC out of Portland, Oregon, is the furthest along by a good margin in putting a practical SMR design into service. Their project is being financed mostly by private capital, but the land the facility will be sited on in eastern Idaho is owned by the Department of Energy. Operational startup of the first installed SMR module is slated for 2026.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of new build nuclear power in the United States depends on successful completion of the NuScale SMR project. If the NuScale project isn’t successful in all respects, we will not see another reactor facility being built in the United States for another two decades or more. So far, the project has kept to its originally estimated schedule and its originally estimated cost.

Looking at DOE’s SMR graphic, what you don’t see in DOE’s own list of SMR benefits is that SMR’s will produce significantly less waste and will reduce proliferation risk, which some proposed SMR designs — but not all — are theoretically capable of doing; for example, the proposed molten salt SMRs.

The NuScale design uses half-height conventional fuel rods produced by our existing nuclear fuel industry. Current plans have all the spent nuclear fuel from the first NuScale SMR facility being stored on site for the projected sixty year operational life of the reactor complex.

NuScale and its project team make the pragmatic assumption that no action on developing a centralized repository for spent nuclear fuel will be forthcoming. That’s fine, because the US doesn’t need to bury its spent nuclear fuel in a geologic repository anytime soon, if ever. Onsite storage is perfectly safe and will remain safe long into the future.

And, looking out a hundred years, it is about as likely that our entire inventory of spent fuel will eventually be retrieved and reprocessed as it is that it will be uselessly abandoned in some man-made underground cavern somewhere.

As I understand it, the first twelve 60 Mw modular reactor units are committed to the Idaho project. However, it remains to be seen if the NuScale design will be successful enough in commercial operation to be sold through Amazon.

The largest feedback to planetary warming is the Planck response – some -3.2 W/m2/K. It is the reason why the planet tends to maximum entropy at energy in equals energy out. It is a dynamic nonequilibrium thermodynamic system. Energy in is from the sun and energy out is reflected or emitted as blackbody radiation. An inequality between energy in and energy out – such as is caused by greenhouse gases – causes the planet to warm or cool until a transient energy equilibrium at TOA is reestablished.

With greenhouse gases the energy content of the system is higher at the new transient energy equilibrium. But there are also large changes in seasonal energy in due to orbital eccentricity and in energy out due to shifting patterns of ocean and atmospheric circulation (Loeb et al 2012) in the Earth system fluid flow field. Oversimplifying turbulent flow dynamics in a skeptic narrative serves no purpose.

“Daniel Rothman, professor of geophysics and co-director of the Lorenz Center in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, has found that when the rate at which carbon dioxide enters the oceans pushes past a certain threshold—whether as the result of a sudden burst or a slow, steady influx—the Earth may respond with a runaway cascade of chemical feedbacks, leading to extreme ocean acidification that dramatically amplifies the effects of the original trigger.”

Carbon has made human life much better over recent centuries, even faster after it started to power transportation and industry and everything we do.

We have crossed the “carbon threshold” and it is “GOOD”, “VERY, VERY, VERY, GOOD!”

Reducing carbon and going back below the “carbon threshold” would lead to mass extinction

Read and understand actual history and data.
Climate models and climate alarmism are some of the newest weapons of mass destruction.

Life on earth will be better and better, but only if we can stay above the “carbon threshold”! There is a “carbon threshold” but it is not a large number, it is a well known low number, we can not survive there.

I do like that alarmists starting using the “carbon threshold”, they lose when they try that. The bad limit is well known and the upper limit has never been reached at thousands of parts per million in the past.

I’m not against nuclear power but Shellenberger over looks the negatives for a reason. Single point of failure, human error and human malice.
And since your into accounting it’s not right to ignore cradle-to-grave cost and benefits.

https://judithcurry.com/2019/07/08/climate-scientists-pre-traumatic-stress-syndrome/#comment-895195
“Nuclear safety costs in Japan surge to staggering heights”
Energy policy called into question as solar and wind power prices fall
SUGURU KURIMOTO, July 09, 2019
“The estimated total cost of bringing plants into compliance with current standards sits at roughly 4.8 trillion yen ($44.2 billion)”
…
“In 2015, the government estimated that nuclear energy would cost as little as 10.3 yen per kilowatt-hour to generate in 2030 — less than coal at 12.9 yen, or solar at 12.5 to 16.4 yen.
But the price of nuclear rises by 1 yen per kilowatt-hour for every 100 billion yen that safety-related expenses add to the cost of a new reactor. Meanwhile, solar and wind have become cheaper, dropping below 10 yen per kilowatt-hour in a growing number of cases overseas and even becoming competitive with nuclear in certain areas.
Consumers may end up bearing a portion of the burden through higher electricity rates.”

And then there is France. EDF is technically bankrupt, their plants are getting pretty old and they seem to be having problems keeping them running when the rivers are running low or too warm.

If nuclear power is strangled while wind and solar can’t do it, we are left with fossil fuels. The article is wrong about the costs of wind and solar and they ought to turn in their ‘finance’ card. They are ignoring costs. Their price per kilowatt for wind and solar is voodoo accounting. Accounting information is supposed to be useful. Not come with a money losing agenda.

They could have used your accounting skills as it seems they are locked into some long term contracts precisely because they depended on nuclear to get 30% of their power from. Maybe you and Shellenberger are ignoring costs too. The 2011 Fukushima nuke disaster alone has to be a multi-trillion $$ liability that will be with Japan for generations… Recalculate and put a price on human error and malice.
This is where they sell solar voodoo.http://pvinsights.com/

I have solar and I have a gas lease. I’m not going to save the world but I really like having a long term 25yr energy supply locked in at 7.22 cents a KWh. I save even more because I bought a used Volt. I expect if I outlive these solar panels I’ll just go back on the grid since it might be even cheaper by then when they get micro-grids deployed.

“What is Cost Accounting?
Cost accounting is an accounting method that aims to capture a company’s costs of production by assessing the input costs of each step of production as well as fixed costs, such as depreciation of capital equipment. Cost accounting will first measure and record these costs individually, then compare input results to output or actual results to aid company management in measuring financial performance.”

So a company is supposed to make money. Cost Accounting looks at each product. Overall Accounting does things like give an overall number for the SEC or the IRS.

If product A makes 4 times what product B makes, we need to know that. Unless product B has some future profit that is not being currently realized, we favor devoting limited resources to product A. There are a bunch of variables besides current profitability of each product. Projecting the future profit of product B is not advised. We don’t want to project anything because we are conservative, and that’s arguably not accounting.

Each product’s numbers flow to the bottom line. We try to include each cost that does hit the bottom line. Actual costs are not lost, ignored or disappeared. If we shade things, we aren’t doing our job. The Cost Accounting numbers are supposed to useful. They have some decision value, though there are many variables. Google will not use Cost Accounting when putting solar on their server farms. They are doing something more complicated like marketing with that.

You apparently are doing Cost Accounting for your home. If you do it correctly, you’ll win. Your utility is apparently not doing it to point of following what it says. They will lose. The one making the correct decisions wins. Therefore, Cost Accounting. When your utility loses, what does that do to you?

Now assume your utility doesn’t lose because of government. It just takes from others, so that you win. It is the middle man. Cost Accounting has perhaps the best chance of answering these questions. At both the individual level and the broad societal level. Though they are not purely financial.

How do we get from something not too complicated to this mess? Government. And regulated utilities. And politicians. Your solar panels are regulated, political, and government. The best way to get solar panels is take the best from politics and finance. And spin them to your advantage. And build allies like ExxonMobil has done. And buy politicians.

Cost Accounting? Not so much.

So, I still look at 1 kilowatt solar systems for my office. I can’t think of anyone within 3 miles of my office that has them. I am on the edge of the Minneapolis suburbs with dense housing all the way to Minneapolis. My decision will be not just one of cost. If I do it, it will a be a look at me decision. Justified by some cost calculations as not so bad. I might paint a smiley face on them. Or my businesses name. Or a message to the aliens. I am on a main road.

What did make sense is replacing about 20 forty watt florescent tubes with LED tubes. I did the rewiring myself on the old fixtures. No more than $200. And no more mercury going forward I do believe.

If you want to do solar, do it, but do not use public money to pay for it or make it pay off for you.
How much of your solar advantage is paid for by tax credits or subsidies?
Good deal for you at other people’s expense. I do not really find fault with you for doing it, but I do find fault with the government that paid you to do it with other people’s money.

Ragnaar,
Totally skipped over the part about extending the lifespan of US nuclear plants. Physics be dammed, by order of the supreme leader all nuclear plants will now last twice as long as designed!

Funny you should mention what happens when my utility loses, what does that do to you?
I live in smack in the middle of one of the biggest utility to go bankrupt ever, TXU. 10s of billions were lost because of some fancy accounting tricks that used long term gas futures contracts to leverage a $45 billion buyout of TXU. All of those losses were then used to avoid taxes. We all chipped in but it’s diluted across 230 million people so we won’t see it, but it happened.

I decided to put in solar when the technology made the economics work. Key factors were the price drop on 240w panels, cheap microinverters and the heat wave that doubled my electric bill in 2011. It was done 100% my cash, no tax credits or grants and I managed to do it will all American made components and labor.
My advice to you is consult with some people that have actual experience doing residential solar. There are some real pros who will give you some good advice here> https://www.solarpaneltalk.com/
PS: At best TLED might be 20% more efficient than standard T4 tubes so the payback is much longer. I considered switching out my florescent tube lights but decided to wait till they burned out… still waiting 10 years later. Waste not want not.

In my reality there is no free market, we generate debt faster than we create income to pay off that same debt and there are negative interest rates on $13 trillion of sovereign debt. Absolutely everything depends on our faith in fiat currencies and the central bankers ability to ‘manage inflation expectations’. Behavioral economics is what rules our global economies and it’s why we will not be able to avoid distant threats like the degradation of the biosphere, not cost accounting.

Less than $130 before sales tax. Old fixture, two 40s. Old ballasts, one/fixture. My client who used to figure this stuff before he did something else said about 20 watts per ballast. So old is 100W and new is 36W. You have to give get the somewhat more expensive tubes for the center mount tombstones. They pivot 90 degrees which is nice. So, you recycle the ballasts which for the above tubes are removed, so I have that cost too. That is you bring them to the recycle place and pay them to take them. The above tubes are bargain basement. They claim 50,000 hours. So there’s that cost savings too. I don’t think they’ll last that long but 10,000 would be nice. And they claim there is no mercury in them so that’s nice.

There’s no support for nuclear power. China and Russia can do it, but they’re authoritarians. France did it until it lost its nerve. We used to do it, until we lost our nerve with the biggest nerve losers being Republicans. They hide from it like children. We sail nuclear on our carriers. The ship everyone wants to sink. We sail nuclear off the coast of Iran. Yet, we can’t build any more of it. That leaves us back with fossil fuels. Coal because we are afraid of nuclear. Like horses because we are afraid of cars. I am optimistic with nuclear. It’s going to take a public relations campaign. And it could be done by the left and the right. And since the left hates fossil fuels, there’s a reason for them to back nuclear.

I don’t know what TXU has to do with this? Reading the Wiki page, the government did something and the politicians did something. They failed or came close enough to that. If they made money, the Federal government would have taxed them. If they lose money, things would balance out and there may be a loss to use against earnings since then. This is standard and even individuals with some businesses do the same thing. Those are called net operating loss carryforwards.

Things might be bleeped up. The S&P 500 just set a record. And I haven’t bailed yet. Those that make the right decisions win. Cost Accounting is supposed to help with that. How many headlines claim solar is cheaper than coal? What language are they speaking and what language should they be speaking? That which aids in making the right decisions. We see this with the warmest June ever. What language is that and is it helping to make the right decisions? The IPCC speaks a language. Some listen to it and some ignore it.

You should look into buying a Kill-a-Watt meter so you can measure exactly what your lights and appliances really cost to operate. I don’t really like florescent lighting because of the 60 cycle flicker so I agree that TLED is superior.

I brought up the TXU BK because it symbolized how the rich (and their accountants) socialize their loses. Would you believe the Hunt family (famous for trying to corner the silver market back in the 80s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday ) tried to takeover the EFH/TXU BK and turn it into a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) so they could dodge taxes. One of the few things Rick Perry did as Gov. that everybody liked was when he stepped in and blocked the deal.
The TXU BK was caused by creative accounting. Big buyout funds like Energy Future Holdings with no management experience in utilities ‘persuaded’ politicians|government to let it happen. Old joke, Boss interviewing an accountant ask him; What’s 2+2 equal? Accountant correctly answers, what do you want it to be?

I’m not sure China will ever complete their nuclear build out but I hope they do. I have seen then reverse course on big infrastructure and energy projects overnight exactly because it’s a top down command economy.

I read the Wiki page on TXU. They didn’t boil it down enough for me to know what happened. It seemed to involve finance which is forward looking. I will loan you money and charge you this interest rate. That is a bet. When I bought LED tubes and modified my fixtures I placed a bet that the my my price per kilowatt would stay the same or rise. Not a bad assumption given Xcel has drank the green kool-aid. But with TXU bets were placed and they didn’t seem to pan out. If I had loaded a grid with wind turbines as is some story from Texas, I’d be going broke too. TXU and Xcel are going broke just like utilities in Germany are. Or their customers are paying more electricity. In no place in the accounting formulas do you get to insert magic. Given the lack of magic, a gain by one is a lose for another. Specifically my LED tubes mean that Xcel’s overhead costs stay the same while I buy less from them. They need to make this up somewhere or have less net income. Of course we can argue my change is too small. My change times one million.

Some point was Cost Accounting. Those that use data most effectively win. Germany did not use data effectively. It has lost. It will also recover but that will take decades and it will not be pretty. To say that solar costs such and such that is often the claim of advocates, is not using data effectively.

We must come up with a cost of wind and solar’s intermittentcy. Omitting that means gas turbine peakers are provided by others to make up for the short comings of wind and solar without them being assigned this cost. It’s nice for wind a solar but it can lead to more wind and solar to the point of serious problems. The signals that prices provide is one of the efficiencies that makes the United States rich and fortunate.

My standard argument is this. Expect home solar owners to provide 1000 watts per hour of back up for 24 hours. Assign a cost of $250 per kilowatt hour for their back up. That’s $6000. Include that cost in the price of a home solar system. This still does almost nothing for seasonal changes as seen in Minnesota. There is hardly any long term storage. Give the batteries a 10 year life and that’s $600 per year in additional costs. If more correctly costed, better decisions. It seems the idea is to not make good decisions.

As to loss rules. While income is taxed and that doesn’t not seem to be in dispute, it seems perfectly consistent to me that income can be offset by losses. It balances. I don’t see the magic with that situation. Most tax loss arguments are non-sense. Most tax deduction arguments are non-sense. There are some things in the tax code that should be thrown away though. But a lot of the time it’s ill informed political hacks making tax loss – bad arguments.

RE: TXU, This wasn’t the first time TXU screwed up. If you go back to the 90s you will see they lost a couple of billion dollars in a Australian scheme. I never saw a line item charge on my electric bill but we Texans still paid for it in higher prices. This eventually led Texas to deregulate the market and move to a demand model from a capacity model.
As to the BK, the final autopsy identified a series of research papers by some petroleum geologist that downplayed the success of fracking shale gas and applied a inflated value to the long term gas contracts EFH used as collateral. Bad science or biased scientist? In other words, they over valued their future contracts by a huge amount and defaulted on their debt. That default also ricocheted through the energy sector dragging down several other companies. A big mess but it happens over and over and I am sure it’s happening again as I type.
RE: solar
“Expect home solar owners to provide 1000 watts per hour of back up for 24 hours.”
From my 9 years of living with solar, I will need at least 80-100 KWh energy storage to be grid independent(optional). A stand alone battery will cost too much but that’s why I bought the Volt. I used it just this week when a storm knocked out power to my whole neighborhood for 7hr. I just flipped the master breaker, plugged in my 1500w inverter into my Volt 14KWh battery and then plugged into my house AC system to run my critical loads like lights, refrigerator, communications etc.. I have to do this several times a year because our power lines aren’t well maintained (mostly trees).
While everybody frets about 100% backup for variable renewable power I think some of that could be addressed by V2G(Vehicle to Grid) once the percent of EVs reaches a critical mass. Won’t completely solve the problem but it is definitely part of the solution.

What’s the impact of #clouds on uncertainties in future #Greenland melt and sea level contribution? [link]

Look at the ice core record.

When the oceans are warmer, there is more ice accumulation on Greenland, there are sufficient clouds to cause that.

When oceans are colder, there is less ice accumulation on Greenland, there is a lack of clouds that cause that.

Nothing more is needed to understand the clouds importance for Greenland.

People get paid well to do mostly useless research write the complicated papers that really say nothing, but say it very well sometimes.

We have ice core data. Use that and study and understand the actual data. Ice accumulation on Greenland was the most during the warmest times and was the least during the coldest times. We are warmer now, but compared to most of the most recent ten thousand years, we are still colder. Ice accumulation now is more than during the Little Ice Age but not as much as most of the warm years in the past ten thousand years.

I have never seen a publication that used climate models to recreate past warm and cold periods. I am sure they likely have tried that but have not published anything because it cannot work. You cannot model something you do not understand. Models are set to correlate with short times in history and extrapolate forward, out of bounds. Their models do not even match each other so they take averages.

Climate model output goes unstable, out of bounds.
Climate has cycles that repeat in bounds.

Contribution of the Greenland Ice Sheet to sea level rise over the next millennium [link]

This is way beyond reasonable, we have Greenland Ice Core data. The data shows huge ice accumulation in warmest times and much less ice accumulation in coldest times. There is ice sequestered on Greenland because, and only because, there is more evaporation of Polar Oceans and snowfall when it is warm enough such that the oceans are not covered with sea ice.
Sequestered ice on Greenland is replenished in warmest times and sequestered ice on Greenland depletes in coldest times.

If they expect to ever understand ice cycles they must study and understand ice core data. They do not even suspect what natural climate change is caused by.